High in the Andes, the Inca read the sky in two ways at once. Like everyone, they joined bright stars into figures. But they also did something almost no other people did: they saw constellations in the dark โ in the black dust-lanes that split the glowing band of the Milky Way.
That band was Mayu, the celestial river. Into its dark pools came animals to drink, their silhouettes blotting out the light: Yacana the great Llama, her eyes the brilliant stars ฮฑ and ฮฒ Centauri; Yutu the partridge; the Fox, the Toad and the winding Serpent.
The bright figures mattered too โ above all Qullqa, the Storehouse (our Pleiades), whose June appearance was studied each year to forecast the rains and time the planting; and Chakana, the Southern Cross, the most sacred shape in the Andes.
Bright-star figures (gold) and the dark-cloud animals of the Milky Way (violet). Tap a kind to light up its figures on the map and table.
โ swipe the strip sideways โ
| Kind | Andean figure | Western |
|---|
Pick a figure to see it on the sky โ bright figures drawn from their stars, dark ones as the shadow they cast on Mayu.
Mayu, the celestial river. The Inca saw the Milky Way as a great river that watered both sky and Earth. It runs at an angle across the heavens, and over a night and a year it wheels around, its dark animals rising and setting in a fixed order โ a living calendar in shadow.
Two rivers, one water. The Inca believed the celestial Mayu and the earthly rivers were one system: the Sun, crossing the Milky Way, was thought to scoop up water and carry it round to fall again as rain.
The harvest star. Each June, farmers across the Andes still judge how bright and clear Qullqa (the Pleiades) looks at its dawn rising. A clear, bright cluster promises good rains and an early planting; a dim, hazy one warns of drought and a late one. Modern science has found the trick works โ thin high cloud from El Niรฑo years really does dim the Pleiades.
Bright figures are drawn from their stars at Hipparcos J2000 positions. The dark-cloud constellations are shown as shaded silhouettes at the approximate positions of the Milky Way's dark nebulae โ their exact outlines vary between sources; identifications follow Gary Urton, At the Crossroads of the Earth and the Sky (1981) and Andean ethnography. The Llama's eyes are the real stars ฮฑ and ฮฒ Centauri. Shared-star links use the same coordinates as The Chinese Sky and The Indian Sky. Live view: The Inca Sky Tonight.